Music and auditory skills can hone cognition and language

It may seem counterintuitive that your ability to tell different sounds apart would have anything to do with your ability to read or handle cognitive challenges. But that’s exactly what the lab of Nadine Gaab, PhD, has been showing.

Gaab discussed the research during a recent Longwood Seminar on Music as Medicine at Harvard Medical School:

The Gaab Lab has amassed an impressive body of work showing that auditory processing impairments correlate with developmental dyslexia, and that people who can detect tiny differences between sounds seem to do better both as musicians and as readers.

Gaab acknowledges that we need more long-term studies to investigate whether there’s really a causative effect or just an association. “We don’t know if someone already had really good auditory processing skills, and that’s why they became a musician, or that musical training improved their auditory processing skills,” she said. Similarly, it could be that children who already have good executive functioning abilities are more attracted to music.

But Gaab is passionate about the importance of music in education. “It’s important to consider that replacing musical programs with reading or math instruction in order to boost standardized test scores may actually lead to deficient scores in other cognitive areas,” she said. “Maybe we’re eliminating exactly the curricula that are important for very basic cognitive skills.”